Children of undocumented Mexican immigrants have a significantly higher risk of behavior problems than their co-ethnic counterparts with documented or naturalized citizen mothers, according to a team of sociologists.

Society and Culture

Society and Culture

Senior psychology major and Schreyer Honors Scholar Ebony Ford is taking her college learning experience to a whole new level, implementing a research study alongside Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Studies Marinda Kathryn Harrell-Levy that investigates transformative relationships.

Penn State researchers with the Family Life Project, a longitudinal study of how children learn and grow in rural communities, are finding the transition from elementary to middle school a critical time for children when it comes to future academic success.

Roy Clariana, professor of education in Penn State's Department of Learning and Performance Systems, recently published research on how software for evaluating human writing is improving and expanding.

Research from Megan Hopkins, assistant professor of education at Penn State, revealed that the teaching of English as a second language and the teaching of academic subjects are separated and disconnected, which can cause English-language learners (ELLs) to fall behind.

Liliana Garces, assistant professor in the College of Education, provides an overview of how colleges and universities are becoming increasingly more diverse, but legal decisions are making it more difficult for institutions of higher learning to assemble a diverse student body.

David Lee, professor of education, is part of a research team that is developing and evaluating a professional development program for seventh- and eighth-grade teachers to help support students experiencing academic, behavioral and social difficulties.

Steven Bonta, instructor in Spanish, has received a 2014-15 Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant to study in Sri Lanka. Bonta will travel during the first half of 2015 to begin documentation of Sri Lanka Gypsy Telugu, a dialect of the Telugu language.

Five articles about communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR), all supported by the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication at Penn State, comprise a special issue of Public Relations Journal which is online now.

Emilia Yang, a communications graduate student and Nicaragua native currently living in Harrisburg, received the Top Student Paper award and Kappa Tau Alpha research award in the Communication and Technology division at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) 2014 annual convention in Montreal.

Dustin Julius, a 2014 bachelor of architecture alumnus who is now pursuing his master of architecture degree at Penn State, has received the Student Silver Award for Design from the Pennsylvania Council Society of American Registered Architects for his project “Complexity and Reduction: An Apparatus for Adjunct Professors.” Julius layered spaces “to create a managed live-work environment for the dynamic, yet underutilized community of adjunct professors” in the Allston neighborhood of Boston.

Career and family, often seen as competing parts of life, can actually complement each other, and when young people's goals for the future encompass family and career, the outcome is more likely to be success in both arenas, according to Penn State researchers.

From motherhood to menopause, from marriage to divorce, women's sexual experiences have profound -- and often unexpected -- effects on not just their sexuality, but also on their feelings of self-worth, according to a Penn State Abington sociologist.

In recent years, the online sharing of images has played a key role in enhancing connections among social network users. People can learn a lot about a user’s interests and experiences through the images he or she posts on the website. However, the widespread sharing of images also increases privacy concerns, since images may go anywhere once shared and are vulnerable to exploitation by malicious attackers. Anna Squicciarini, an assistant professor at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST), is in the process of developing methods to help social network users appropriately control access to their shared images.

Timebanking -- a new paradigm that fuses community engagement with technology -- is gradually gaining ground, according to Jack Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State. With the aid of a new grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), he is developing an app that would help bring timebanking further into the mainstream.